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8 Cool enough for Lou Reed?: The plays of Ed Thomas and the cultural politics of South Wales1 SHAUN RICHARDS In the conclusion to his 1985 book When Was Wales? the historian Gwyn A. Williams declared that the Welsh were now ‘nothing but a naked people under an acid rain’ (305). Written in the aftermath of the anti- devolution vote of 1979 and the fatal blow delivered to the economy and confidence by the defeat of the 1984 miners’ strike, Williams’s work, for all its tentative faith that some form of Wales will survive, is a litany of loss. Above all it mourns the loss of a Welshness of class and community which provided illuminating moments of inspiration, and in particular the loss of a righteous communal resistance to injustice captured in the triumphant mass resistance to the government’s 1934–5 Unemployment Assistance Board Act. This victory of grass-roots radicalism, argued Williams, buoyed up the flagging confidence of a people ravaged by unemployment and ‘carried [them] into their liberating World War on a surge of socialist and Labour hope’ (264). While the cultural and linguistic reality of Wales encompasses far more than the heavy industry and socialism of the predominantly English-speaking southern valleys it is that Wales which is home to the highest percentage of the population. It is also the Wales which has come closest to extinction. For despite the ravages experienced by the hill farmers of rural Wales it is the south which has seen the erasure of the very sources of income upon which the community was founded and through which its identity was forged. In the aftermath of what Williams termed ‘the terrible year 1979, blwyddyn y pla, the year of the plague … The elections of that year seemed to call into question the whole basis on which Welsh history had hitherto been written’ (1990/91: 57). Such an analysis might appear idiosyncratic in the light of the rock band Catatonia’s celebratory ‘Every day when I wake up/I thank the Shaun Richards - 9781526137227 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 07:21:15AM via free access Norquay_09_Ch8 137 22/3/02, 10:04 am 138 Cultural negotiations Lord I’m Welsh’ (1998). Coming at the end of the 1990s, a decade which saw the triumph of the Manic Street Preachers, this unironic paean to a nationality whose future Gwyn Williams had doubted only a decade earlier suggests either an inadequacy in his analysis or a staggering reversal of economic and cultural fortunes. As the decade closed with the establishment of a Welsh Assembly it might appear that Williams was simply wrong in pronouncing that with the 1979 anti-devolution vote, and the swing to Conservatives throughout almost all of Wales in the General Election of that year, the Welsh had identified themselves with southern England and ‘finally disappeared into Britain’ (1985: 305). The socialism forged in the inter-war years can still be found in the self- confessed ‘classic labour’ (Maconie 1998: 96) lyrics of the Manic Street Preachers whose ‘A design for life’ (1996) announced ‘Libraries gave us power/Then work came and made us free’. Yet even this anthemic assertion of the cultural and material foundations of traditional valleys socialism acknowledges the extent to which it is an historical memory in the bleak contemporaneity of the next line: ‘What price now for a shallow piece of dignity?’ However, out of this complex of economic despoliation, a burgeoning cultural confidence and residual socialism has emerged a fledgling theatre movement which captures the trauma consequent on the fact that, in the words of Ed Thomas, foremost among these playwrights, ‘old Wales is dead’ (1997). But Thomas is not here reflecting on the loss of Williams’s cauldron of radicalism. His reference point is a Cymru of clichés whose longevity was demonstrated by Shirley Bassey’s Welsh-dragon dress at the 1999 Welsh Assembly celebrations. The reference to Max Boyce in the title of Thomas’s 1997 article, ‘A land fit for heroes (Max Boyce excluded)’ neatly captures the image which he wishes to dispel: the caricature of Welsh- ness whose soft sentimentality eases away the necessity of self-analysis. The thrust of Thomas’s argument is that a people can only live in, and live up to, the images of themselves which circulate in the culture. As one of the characters in his first play, House of America (1994b [1988]), expressed it: ‘look at Wales, where’s its kings, where’s our heroes? … one answer, mate, we haven’t got any. I mean let’s face it Boyo, Harry Secombe isn’t a bloke I’d stand in the rain for, is he?’ (46–7). And as suggested by Thomas’s extended list of images capable of producing a cultural cringe, ‘[the] Wales of stereotypes, leeks, daffodils, look-you- now-boyo rugby supporters singing Max Boyce songs in three-part harmony while phoning Mam to tell her they’ll be home for tea and Welsh cakes’ (1997) is one whose demise he would welcome. Shaun Richards - 9781526137227 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 07:21:15AM via free access Norquay_09_Ch8 138 22/3/02, 10:04 am The plays of Ed Thomas 139 Negative or disempowering stereotypes are an integral part of political and cultural colonialism. While efforts to locate Wales within any post-colonial paradigm inevitably looks strained owing to the fact that the undeniable colonisation ‘happened seven centuries ago, rather than in the last century’ (Aaron 1995: 15), the implications of the nursery rhyme ‘Taffy was a Welshman/Taffy was a thief’ are clear. Evelyn Waugh’s description of the Welsh in Decline and Fall as ‘low of brow, crafty of eye, and crooked of limb … [slavering] at their mouths, which hung loosely over their receding chins’ (1937 [1928]: 65–6) finds its 1990s equivalent in A. A. Gill’s Sunday Times claims that the Welsh are an assortment of ugly trolls. Although Rhys Ifans’s portrayal of a Welsh- man stole the screen in Notting Hill through the force of its comic brio, that image only served to reinforce images of the Welsh as voluble sexual obsessives. Thomas, however, insists that ‘[we] can’t just blame the ignorance and stereotypes on people from outside’ (quoted in McLean 1995: 6). Self-generated images have themselves ensured that the Welsh are incarcerated in a cultural landscape formed of an amalgam of John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Loren Kruger has written persuasively on the role of the theatre in establishing a national hegemony by ‘summoning a representative audience that in turn recognizes itself on stage’ (1987: 35). The vibrant contribution of theatre to establishing a rejuvenated sense of nation in countries and moments as diverse as nineteenth-century Norway and twentieth-century Ireland suggests the possibility of a Welsh equivalent. The reality, however, is captured in Carl Tighe’s 1986 observation that despite the ‘enormous social and political and industrial changes that have swept over Wales in the last ten or fifteen years’ (251), its stages have seen merely ‘a parade of West End copies, examination texts and amne- siac froth’ (258). ‘There is’, he argued, ‘a general refusal to engage with the idea of Wales’ (255), or rather to explore realities as opposed to an idea of Wales where ‘sentimental twaddle’ (257) dominates and the country is seen as populated by ‘barmy eccentrics, loonies and no good boyos’ (256). Tighe’s dispiriting summary provides the context within which Thomas’s observation that ‘we haven’t created enough fictions ourselves’ takes its force (quoted in McLean 1995: 6). His objective is to create what he terms ‘a vibrant and invented contemporary mythology … a landscape of fiction that reflects the way we live, love and die; a fiction that shows us our experiences are particular and at the same time universal’ (Thomas 1997: 18). With the establishment of Y Cwmni (now Fiction Factory) in 1988, Thomas engaged in the process of first Shaun Richards - 9781526137227 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 07:21:15AM via free access Norquay_09_Ch8 139 22/3/02, 10:04 am 140 Cultural negotiations analysing then generating adequate fictions to live by; a process which continued across the 1990s. In addition to Thomas’s plays this decade saw the proliferation of alternative Welsh images across a variety of genres, most particularly music and film. In a 1997 interview with Thomas, Heike Roms speculated that contemporary Welsh youth would ‘find their role-models in films like Twin Town rather than in the writings of Jack Kerouac’ (1998b: 190), which drove the protagonist of Thomas’s House of America. While Twin Town (1997) blasts open images of Wales as an extended Llareggub, a closer analysis suggests a less progressive set of values than implied by Roms and forms a useful point of comparison to Thomas’s attempts to stimulate ‘a multicultural Wales with a myriad of sustainable myths’ (Davies 1998a: 117). After the sweep of the camera across the expanse of Swansea Bay and fleeting glimpses of the city’s loveable, if slightly eccentric, normality, the film roars into action as two teenagers, the Lewis twins, joy-ride, Bullit-like, down the steep streets of the city before stopping outside a doctor’s surgery and picking up a pensioner couple. ‘Now don’t forget, there’s a welcome for you both in the choir practice. Your father was a fine tenor, be a shame to break the mould, innit?’ are the words of the husband to the blank-faced boys.